San Antonio artist Samuel Velasquez draws on everything from paranormal Web sites to mythology for inspiration for his otherworldly paintings. “I’m attracted to the fantastical,” he said. “I like ghost stories and Bigfoot sightings and UFO abductions and weird things like that."

San Antonio artist Samuel Velasquez draws on everything from paranormal Web sites to mythology for inspiration for his otherworldly paintings. “I’m attracted to the fantastical,” he said. “I like ghost

San Antonio painter Samuel Velasquez captures his imaginative vision such as "Half Awake" in oil on canvas. The artist himself admits “Half Awake,” with its spaceman in a brass-plated suit, “looks like the DVD cover of a bad B-movie from the ’50s.”

San Antonio painter Samuel Velasquez captures his imaginative vision such as "Half Awake" in oil on canvas. The artist himself admits “Half Awake,” with its spaceman in a brass-plated suit, “looks like

"New Form" is one of Samuel Velasquez most recent paintings, showing a looser, freer style than previous works, but still full of personal symbology.

"New Form" is one of Samuel Velasquez most recent paintings, showing a looser, freer style than previous works, but still full of personal symbology.

Photo: Courtesy Of The Artist

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"Lost," says artist Samuel Velasquez, is about enlightenment: "I learned that there is no path to enlightenment; you either wake up or stay in the delusion."

"Lost," says artist Samuel Velasquez, is about enlightenment: "I learned that there is no path to enlightenment; you either wake up or stay in the delusion."

Photo: Courtesy Of The Artist

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Samuel Velasquez's paintings such as "The Scream Into the Void" are inspired by "stories of monsters in the corners, that creepy feeling of being watched, and that thunder struck feeling of awe."

Samuel Velasquez's paintings such as "The Scream Into the Void" are inspired by "stories of monsters in the corners, that creepy feeling of being watched, and that thunder struck feeling of awe."

Photo: Photo By Steve Bennett

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Visual ghost stories

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In a growing body of mind-blowing work, “Lost” stands out as Samuel Velasquez's mea culpa.

It's a come-to-Jesus moment depicting a stone castle rising out of storm-tossed waters on a dark night with a full moon. A faceless humanoid creature battles what seems to be a very agitated goose. A tornado swirls. Beetles swarm. A tower-size candle burns.

“It's based on my understanding of enlightenment,” says Velasquez, whose otherwordly, romantic, apocalyptic imagery is often inspired by his reading of everything from paranormal websites to Joseph Campbell myth. “I learned that there is no path to enlightenment; you either wake up or stay in the delusion.”

Velasquez, a bright 26-year-old San Antonio native with windswept boy-band black hair and a dark birthmark under his left eye, woke up a few years ago.

After concentrating for three years on psychology at Palo Alto College, he took a course with painter and faculty member Lloyd Walsh that basically changed his life: He decided to commit to art.

“I drew constantly when I was a kid, but it was never encouraged,” he said. “In my family, you got a job and a wife after high school.”

Velasquez, who grew up on the South Side, took the odd art class at Palo Alto but was never satisfied with his work.

“You could safely say my work was cliché and boring,” he said. “It was based on other people's work or followed tried-and-true templates.”

He also was growing less and less enthusiastic about his choice of major.

“I was growing more and more depressed with psychology,” he said.

Walsh, known for his rich oil portraits of rather eccentric animals, taught him more than composition and color-mixing.

“He taught me how to paint,” Velasquez said. “He made us copy famous paintings, but when he let us do what we wanted, I knew I had to make a choice.”

That path led him to the art department of the University of Texas at San Antonio, from which he graduated with a studio art degree this year. He plans to return for his master's degree in the spring.

“If anything, I just unlocked a door for him,” Walsh says. “He's just a natural, with this sort of quirky sensibility that I really relate to. He's part of a very exciting group of young artists that is starting to emerge in San Antonio.”

“It was a complete surprise,” he says. “I wasn't expecting to be picked.”

MacAdam said she was looking primarily for originality — “quirkiness” was the word she used as well — when making her choices, which began with submissions from more than 130 artists and ended with a whirlwind round of about a dozen studio visits.

“I was looking for intense personal visions,” MacAdam said.

She certainly found them in Velasquez, whose work she calls “compulsively detailed, alluding to 17th-century still life with references to pop culture.”

What he may lack in discipline, Velasquez more than makes up for in imagination. His sketchbooks are repositories for fevered dreams that he refines into psychedelic, hallucinatory images on canvas, full of personal symbols and sacred objects, from bumblebees to bunnies to all sorts of birds and fish, robots and spacemen and creatures from some dark recess. Lotus flowers spring up in several works.

The artist himself admits a painting called “Half Awake,” with its spaceman in a brass-plated suit, “looks like the DVD cover of a bad B-movie from the '50s.”

In a recent work called “New Form,” he paints a square-headed robot (who looks like a cousin of Rosie, the Jetsons' maid) shooting red laser beams from its eyes. The robot is melting, beetles crawling out of a gaping hole in its body, while an old toad looks on, rather mournfully. A feisty blue bird, a heron maybe, is pouring green goo from a flowered pitcher over the robot, but it's unclear if he's causing the melting or trying to ease the pain.

It is painted in a much freer, looser style than previous work — which tended toward dark backgrounds and stiffer figures — with a splashy, runny background, and a brighter color palette.

“I never made a mess when I was painting,” he said, “but I did when I was doing that background, throwing paint around. I never really did that.”

Velasquez is maturing, but hopefully not too much.

“His imagery really sparks a lot of people's imaginations, especially younger viewers who are looking for more out of First Friday (gallery openings) than a pub crawl,” Walsh said. “One of the signs of success is when you have a group of people around a painting and they get out their cellphones to take a picture. When I saw the (Blue Star) show, Sammy was getting more cellphone photos than anybody else.”

What does it all mean? The hallucinatory visions with spacemen befriending bunnies? Velasquez could tell you, but he'd rather not.

“After hearing, ‘I don't get it, I don't get it' a thousand times, it's really satisfying when you find that one person who says, ‘Does this mean ...?' and they're right-on.

“I'm attracted to the fantastical,” he added with a shrug. “I like ghost stories and Bigfoot sightings and UFO abductions and weird things like that. I mix it up with mythology and Joseph Campbell-type of thinking and it comes out like this. It's my way of telling ghost stories.”